The “real” part refers to the fact that these blogs are owned by third parties who have requested to receive content from members. This is an important point for SEO reasons; in the past Google announced that it was cracking down on blog networks where one person owns numerous blogs and links are auto posted on them. Google was trying to weed out that kind of tactic, as those type of blogs are not adding value to the internet and the technique of creating a lot of sites where links are automatically posted on them is seen as artificial and manipulative in a search engine’s eyes.

A good blog network is made up of user-submitted blogs and the owners of those blogs are free to decide which posts sent to them are actually published. The blogs often have other content on them as well, with the content we send them simply supplementing the blog owner’s own activities. It’s not that much different to blog owners going to article directories to get regular content to add to their blogs manually.

Niche Focused Blogs The “niche” part of that phrase is referring to the specific focus of the blogs on our network. An article directory is usually not very specific–it is not usually focused on a particular niche and can be generic. Rather, article directories will most often have many different categories and different types of content. While that system works well for an article directory’s purposes, there are SEO benefits to having your articles published on websites that contain content related to the general theme of your article (and your articles are always related to the theme of your website).

The opinion of other sites as to what your site is about, indicated by the text used in the link, is vitally important in the SEO game. The backlinks that your website receives from other websites have extra special authority for the search engines, because backlinks are less under the direct control of the site owner (you), and so less subject to artificial manipulation. So, let’s say your website is about German Shepherd dogs. All other factors being equal, a link to your site coming from a website that is about dogs is a more meaningful link than one that comes from a site that is just general and has no particular focus on dogs. To take it one step further, a link from a site that is specifically about German Shepherd dogs would create an even more powerful (meaningful) link in Google’s eyes than the link coming from the site that is about dogs in general.

There is a SEO benefit to having your articles republished on websites that are in a similar niche, as it helps send a stronger message to Google about what your website is about. The closer the site linking back to yours is in topic the better. Blogs tend to be more niche specific anyway (moreso than article directories), but the blogs on a article submission site distribution list have the ability to be extremely specific–blog publishers can specify exactly what type of content they want to receive, even stating what words or phrases that they require of the articles that are sent to them. The benefit to you is that your articles potentially end up on web pages that are closely related in topic to your own website, which makes the backlink(s) in the resource box more meaningful.